by Apatow, Judd
Judd: And what did that lead to?
Martin: It led to just kind of continually working in Toronto. Canada is a great place to work, because you’re not pigeonholed. There’s no star system. You’re not put in a kind of “He does that and that’s all we’ll ever ask him to do” role. So, you can do commercials and Shakespeare for radio and musicals—you can do anything, if you get the job. I did all that for about six years, until ’78 or so, when I joined Second City. Then I did that for a couple of years and then did it in the States and did a series called The Associates and then—
Judd: The Associates was highly acclaimed, but that also got canceled.
Martin: The story of my life.
Judd: How does Second City work?
Martin: It works in a—it’s very organized. The set show is from nine until ten-thirty and then there’s a break and there are improvisations. They are free, so if you’re arriving at eleven you can watch them, and they are based on suggestions from the audience—they fall under different categories of places or current events. Then you go backstage and you put up this piece of paper with all the suggestions and you have about ten minutes to come up with a scene. You might give the lighting guy a cue, like, “Okay when I reach this line, cut it” or “We’re going to go in this direction.” Sometimes the lighting guy is very important—he might look at a scene and take it out earlier, let it go. The scenes are taped, so four minutes later when it’s time to write another show, the main bulk of the show, the part that people pay for, you sit around saying, “Wait a second. There was a scene I did one night, an improvisation—what was that scene about a cabdriver?” And then they pull out the tape—when I was there, they were audiotapes, but now they’re audiovisual tapes—and you look at it and you remember what you said. Then you start rewriting and building it.
Judd: You have ten minutes to do fifteen different pieces. How do you handle that? Does it always work or—
Martin: No, often you bomb. You bomb bad. But it doesn’t matter because the audience knows you’re improvising, and so they’re kind of with you. I mean, it’s fun.
Judd: How does it work [on SCTV]? Is it all cast writers? Do you have additional writers other than the cast?
Martin: Yes, we do. The cast writes but there are five additional writers. You come up with an idea, you write it out, and you take it into weekly or biweekly meetings where everyone sits around in a circle over a big desk and reads the material. The material is voted on, whether they wanted it in the show, and sometimes, very few times, a sketch is totally thrown out. Usually what happens is suggestions are offered from everyone in the room about how it could be better, and that sketch is taken away and improved, and read again, and passed, and put up on a bulletin board, and through that a show is assembled.
Judd: Do you have an audience?
Martin: No.
Judd: Does that help the show, you think?
Martin: For the kind of show SCTV is, yes. You know, Saturday Night Live has the advantage of that energy that it gets from being live, but it has the disadvantage, too, of only being able to do a take once.
Judd: Do you have a laugh track?
Martin: Yes.
Judd: And do you think that hurts the feel of the show? Because sometimes those are not so good.
Martin: It’s like anything: If it’s done well, it doesn’t. If it’s done badly, it does.
Judd: Anybody that we would know who you worked with on Second City?
Martin: You mean, onstage?
Judd: Yeah.
Martin: Well, Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas…
Judd: They were all doing that at the same time they were doing SCTV?
Martin: Some had left and some would come back for a month. That’s what was great about Second City. You could go back if you wanted.
Judd: How do you become part of Second City? Isn’t there an audition where they make you do characters?
Martin: There is a system. There’s an audition where you have to do five characters coming in a door and then you leave and you come through the door again as another character. If you’re good at that, you usually get into the touring company, and you do resorts up north, like any touring company. From there, you go to the main company.
Judd: Did you ever do stand-up comedy, like in a club?
Martin: Yeah, I played with that a little bit in California, but it’s just not as much fun. When I was doing The Associates, I would go down—Robin Williams was a friend of mine, and he was doing Mork & Mindy in the next studio and he would go down every Monday and join the Comedy Store players at the Comedy Store, and so I started doing that. It wasn’t the greatest improvisational atmosphere, because the Comedy Store is primarily for stand-up comics, so I would watch, and tried it a couple of times, but it was just not as much fun.
Judd: You like the challenge of bombing?
Martin: No, I don’t like bombing.
Judd: Or the challenge of knowing it could go down the tubes?
Martin: I’m not crazy about risking it, except it does feel great when it succeeds.
Judd: Were you funny as a kid? Class clown?
Martin: If you call this funny, I guess. I fooled around a lot, yeah. Some teachers thought I was a saint, others a nightmare.
Judd: The ones that thought you a nightmare: Why would that be?
Martin: I would just constantly fool around.
Judd: Did you go to college?
Martin: Yes. I graduated as a social worker. I was—I originally went into premed and then I realized I hated science. I did two years of premed. So, I switched to social work, and that’s where I met Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas—I went to school with them.
Judd: What do you think about Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas making—I guess they just finished their movie Strange Brew. What do you think about, like, all of a sudden, two characters from SCTV becoming national characters?
Martin: Oh, it’s great. It’s great.
Judd: Is that strange, when a little skit turns into a big hit?
Martin: Yeah. Dave is a good friend of mine and he is constantly amazed, too.
Judd: Okay, so when you’re doing impressions in the show, do they write sketches for you and then say, “You’re going to have to do an impression of so-and-so,” and then you have to develop it?
Martin: Well, a lot of the impersonations, you write yourself. I’m trying to think. There’s a few instances where someone will say, Will you play this person? And you’ll try to figure it out.
Judd: How do you develop the impression itself? Do you just wing it?
Martin: I look at tapes. Makeup can take three or four hours, so I sit with a Walkman on and listen to the voice, and sometimes I’ll get certain phrases that the actual person—when I was doing Huntz Hall, there were phrases he would use and I would lift those phrases out and put—even if it was just a word or two words together, a certain sound, you know—I’d put them into the script. You can mimic that.
Judd: You also did a Robin Williams impression. You did all the different little characters that he does, and it was amazing. How did you develop that?
Martin: Well, I know Robin, so there’s all different things—there’s his “ha ha,” a laugh which he rarely does on television, and I—that was from seeing him on The Tonight Show and he just never sat still, so I came up with the premise for Tang, the guy trying to get the answer out of him, and Robin wouldn’t do it. You just get into the voice, you know? I did Paul Anka one week and I could not get him at all. I was sitting in that makeup chair and I was trying—I kept staring at the makeup job they were doing and listening to Anka with my Walkman in my ears, and the longer they did my makeup, the more I become like him or sound like him. Sometimes it just evolves.
Judd: Do you have any idea what you want to do after SCTV?
Martin: My dream is to do a Broadway show. I’ve always wanted to do a Broadway musical. I like doing television. I get terribly unhappy if
I’m not doing something comfortable, and if I don’t think it’s particularly good.
Judd: Are there any skits from SCTV that you’re particularly proud of?
Martin: Um, I guess the one—there are two sketches that—there are three sketches—no, there’s four, eight, twelve sketches that I feel strongly…No, I guess like a sketch called “Oh That Rusty,” which was about a child star who had been playing an eight-year-old for thirty-one years, and now he’s real old and fat; but he would wear a wig, and they would have to build the set real big to make him look young and to make the show relevant in the seventies, they fired his mother and hired a seven-foot-two black guy to play his father so he would look short in size.
Judd: I liked “The Boy Who Couldn’t Wait for Christmas.”
Martin: That’s a strange one. That’s just a short little piece about a guy who can’t get to sleep before Christmas, and that’s the kind of piece that you write and you kind of—it’s real personal, so you write it alone in your office and you hand it in and go home because you’re assuming that people are going to say, “How does this happen?” “Well, look, he’s tired.” You know? Then you get a phone call that says, “We like it.” Oh, good. Okay.
Judd: How much rehearsal time goes into something like that?
Martin: Not a great deal. But there’s a Sunday rehearsal, where we’ll sit and discuss with the director how we like things done, and he’ll say to us, “No, it’d be better this way,” and you work out the scene. Then you rehearse a couple times on the floor, two, three, four times. I like to do lots of takes.
Judd: What do you find funny?
Martin: There are not many things that I don’t find funny. I think the Three Stooges are great, but if they’re not on top of it, they’re not funny. Woody Allen is fabulous, but if he’s not on top of it, he’s not so fabulous. There’s no one kind of comedy that is synonymous with my comedy. I like physical comedy. And comedy that comes out of nowhere—unexpected twists are the most interesting to me. It gets boring if it becomes predictable.
MEL BROOKS
(2013)
When I was growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, one thing was understood: Nobody was funnier than Mel Brooks. Yes, we all enjoyed our Woody Allen movies and our Blake Edwards movies, but there was never any real debate: Mel Brooks was the king.
He is the original gangster of comedy. His work dates back to Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner, for chrissakes. He is the 2,000 Year Old Man. He’s responsible for, at minimum, two of the top ten comedies of all time, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. (There is a legitimate argument to be made that he is responsible for more than half of the top ten.) One could say Blazing Saddles is still the edgiest comedy ever made; screamingly funny and original, yes, but all in the service of important thoughts about race. I’m not sure it could be made again today.
I hesitate to use the word important when talking about comedy, or movies in general, but Mel Brooks is important. His movies are important. And even now, in his late eighties, he’s as funny as funny gets—and a hell of a lot quicker than the rest of us.
Mel Brooks: So, what was it before Apatow?
Judd Apatow: What was it before? It was Apa-toe.
Mel: Okay, not such a big move. I mean, people from Europe, they made really big moves.
Judd: Oh, you mean before they shortened it? I think it could have been Apatovski.
Mel: Yes, it could have been that. You have no idea?
Judd: I think it was Apatapatovski. There’s this strange man that keeps sending me information about my history and I’m not even asking him to do it. He recently sent me a photo of my great-great-grandfather’s cemetery plot.
Mel: Where, in the Bronx somewhere?
Judd: Brooklyn. He said, “I just happened to go to the gravestone of your family member.” Should I be nervous?
Mel: No, there’s a lot of people like that. They don’t mean any harm. There’s a guy that sends me stuff on my Uncle Louis. His people came from Poland. My people came from Kiev. I don’t know what they’re talking about but anyway, I had an Uncle Louis. My real name is Kaminsky. K-A-M-I-N-S-K-Y. Danny Kaye’s name, too. A lot of talented guys named Kaminsky. I think Hank Greenberg’s name was Kaminsky. Anyway, so he was telling me about my Uncle Louis, who was a zealot. He was a rabbi and a zealot in Poland. And it’s where we just keep moving. We move, you know, they arrest us, and then we move. And so Uncle, Great-Great-Great-Great-Uncle Louis, my grandfather’s uncle, was always getting arrested. I asked the guy, “Well, why?” He said, “Well, on Saturday he would pick up a brick and break windows and they’d say, ‘Louis, you know we’re Protestant, we’re Catholic, we’re open for business. We’re not Jews.’ He said, ‘Nobody should be open on Saturday.’ ” So I come from that stock. You can see a lot of that in me. I’m a bit of a zealot. I’m a zealot when it comes to bagels. I have never eaten—I think I’ve eaten two or three bagels in California and I just break into tears. It’s the water.
Judd: You’re not on that non-gluten kick.
Mel: No.
Judd: You’re full gluten. Well, I should do this introduction of you because it’s a long one.
Mel: Really? Why don’t you do the highlights of Mel Brooks? Go ahead.
Judd: Well, according to this—
Mel: Like the highlights of Hamlet.
Judd: Okay, ready? (Reading) “In every medium through which entertainment could possibly pass, Mel has made people laugh all over the world.” It says here, you are one of only eleven people in history to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award.
Mel: Right, I also got other awards. I have a fifty-yard dash from PS 19. I have many awards that I just don’t brag about. But they’re important to me.
Judd: Are they, though? Do you care? Like, do you care that you won the Oscar?
Mel: You know, when I was younger, I really did. It was thrilling. But then as you get older, you’re more interested in your cholesterol.
Judd: When a bad movie wins an Oscar, do you get mad because you’re like, That kind of ruins my Oscar?
Mel: No, no, no. I forgive and forget. It’s not good to have a grudge against anything.
Judd: Actually, I disagree. There are a lot of reasons to have grudges. I’m mad at everyone in this room right now. This is quite a crowd we have here.
Mel: We have a good crowd.
Judd: These are fans. These are hard-core fans.
Mel: And they’ve washed.
Judd: Yes.
Mel: They’re all clean. I’m smelling, they all smell good.
Judd: Well, our first question here—people are going to stand up and read questions.
Mel: Sure.
Judd: Steve Bugdonoff. Glendora, California. Did I say it right? How did I do with my pronunciation?
Steve: Horrible.
Judd: Oh no. Let’s hear it. Let’s hear what it is.
Steve: It is Bogdonoff.
Judd: Bogdonoff, see, that is not the way anyone says that name.
Mel: You are the only one who would say Bogdonoff. We have Bogdonovich. We have ways of saying Bogdonoff. But most of us would say Bugdonoff. Even though it’s your own name, I think you’re in the minority. I mean it.
Steve: First of all, Mr. Brooks, thank you for this opportunity. As a longtime fan, my question is: Classic comedy like Blazing Saddles probably couldn’t be made today and—
Mel: I agree. Probably couldn’t. The N-word couldn’t be used as frequently and spiritlessly.
Steve: Yet the film so perfectly lampoons bigotry, so my question is: How do you feel about today’s standard of political correctness?
Mel: I think that word in and of itself is pale and kind of weak. And jejune. I’m very bright. Jejune. Jejune—you’ll have to look it up—but it’s just timid and I don’t think anybody really covers racial hatred the way it should be covered. I agree with you. I agree with you even though you say your name wrong.
Judd: How did people react to it at the time?<
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Mel: At the time, there were letters. There were many letters from many people that said, How could you say that word? You’re hurting so many people with the using the N-word, you know. And I had hired a very dear friend of mine who was working at the Vanguard in New York at the time when I was writing the movie. Richard Pryor, probably the best stand-up comic that ever lived. Man, he was the best. I said Richard, “I want you to write this movie with me.” He fell in love with Mongo. He wrote a lot of Mongo. So anyway, I would say when the little old lady with the bonnet is walking down the street in Rockridge and Cleavon Little greets her and says, “Good morning, ma’am, and isn’t it a lovely morning?” And she says, “Up yours, nigger.” Boom, you know, it’s like, wow. Everything gets silent. But then we kind of save it a little bit. He goes into the jailhouse and he’s in kind of tears and talks to Gene Wilder, who was the Waco Kid, and Gene says, “Well, what did you expect? ‘Come home, marry my daughter’? This is 1874, this is, these are people of the land. These are pioneers. You know, morons.” And that kind of took the edge off. But, you know, that was a tough one. John Calley—God bless him, he died last year—ran production for Warner Brothers at the time. So I said to John, “Can we beat the shit out of a little old lady? Can we actually punch a horse? Can we use the N-word? Can we?” And Calley said, “Mel, if you’re going to go up to the bell, ring it.” And I never, that was early in my career and I never forgot what he said. I’ve gone, you know, uh, with the caveman masturbating in the History of the World—I was ringing the bell. I never forgot that advice.
Judd: The next question is from Richard Walden.
Richard: It’s an honor.
Mel: It’s a pleasure.
Richard: Who was the funniest celebrity you know? And I don’t mean someone who is funny on camera, but someone we might not think is funny, but in real life—
Mel: Carl Reiner is a seriously, seriously funny guy. He lost his wife, Estelle—she was a great singer, great person, great friend of Anne and I, just a wonderful person. Carl is still alive, he’s ninety-one. He’s a great comedian to this day. Estelle used to just rifle through magazines to buy things. She bought things through the mail all the time. She’d pick a dress, she’d pick a thing. She’d pick an iron. If there were Ginsu knives, Estelle had them. So anyway, the doorbell rang after she had passed away and a guy came and said, “Package for Estelle Reiner,” and Carl wondered what it was and he took it and he said, “It’s not a package for Estelle Reiner; it is Estelle Reiner.” It had come from the Neptune Society and they, you know—but I mean, the guts. That’s a brave comment.
